Something, Something, Something.... Dark Side

<O o O> are a mature PvE focused social guild that aim to explore SWTOR together as a team and conquer all the content that it has to offer as soon as possible. We are used to high end heroic content and have accomplished leaders who are very experienced in guild and operation (raid) management. The guild will not be strictly limited to PvE, <O o O> also encourages all arms of MMO gameplay including PvP and crafting.

The guild is formed from a group of friends who play a wide variety of games together online. The core of the group are from an old Warcraft guild from the Executus server, although we have participated in WAR and Aion together as well as BF3 and a number of other competitive games. The guild is also closely associated with the ‘Gaming OverCast’ podcast team, we recommend you subscribe to their podcast and head over to their forum to discuss all forms of gaming.

Last night we managed to create a fully ranged ops team for the first time due to people being away for family commitments etc. Gotta love Sorc and sniper DPS!!

I decided that with the new tactics we had discussed and a fully ranged setup we would be best going to Karagga's Palace to try and get some progress kills.

We killed Bonethrasher in 2 or 3 pulls and moved on to the bounty hunting team - after working out why the tanks were taking such massive damage spikes we moved on to the 3rd boss who really is a bit of a joke as long as you know when he will drop agro and can time cool downs correctly.

So 3 new bosses and 3 easy kills - well done to everyone involved, and welcome to our 3 new members who help ed make the kills possible. We are now up to 7/10 hard modes down, and i think we really should consider doing EV on Nightmare mode next week.

Monday night we killed Soa pretty quickly after learning the fight well the night before. After dealing with the looting bug relating to ending the fight in a mind trap we finally managed to get everyone their loot.

On Tuesday after the reset we re-cleared the entire EV instance to enable us to do Hardmode on Wednesday night. We had a crappy bug on Soa that meant we could not get any loot because we were stuck in combat and couldn't rez the people lemming jumping to the bottom of his room - a very crappy design from Bioware that will hopefully be addresses soon - there is no reason not to extend the speeder flight down there or at least add a lift after the boss is killed.

Anyway on Wednesday night we carried on fighting bugs to try and get the first boss in EV down on hard mode - due to numerous bugs with the defence towers before the boss and having to reset the instance and reform the group constantly we managed to get one good try on the boss in 1hr with a 30% attempt with a dps dead for the entire fight.

We are going to give up because fighting all the bugs is really painful, however we opted to carry on after a vote and thankfully the boss started to behave as intended and we were allowed to get stuck in properly. After hitting enrage a few times with 5 or 6% hp left and a few respec's and other minor changes we managed to finally squeeze out the extra dps required to get the boss down.

He dropped Tier 3 gloves, an really nice schematic for a cunning dps ear piece and some other Columni level drops. Sadly Bantora ninja'd most of the loot by accident after we all passed and he looted the boss with auto loot all on!! DOH!

We managed to get a few good tries in for Gharj, but after hitting some new bugs we had to reset the instance and couldn't be bothered to re-clear all the trash so we called it a night - we'll be back before long to clear through to Soa!

Good work everyone and keep up the hard work - hopefully we will have more recruits and people leveled so we can hit 16man real soon.

Last a small crack team of O o O's finest combat operatives (plus Upayidance) set out to make some progress in the SWTOR end game.

We started out with BoneThrasher, however it appears that either the encounter was bugged or he is un-tankable, with a pretty tight enrage timer for the gear we are wearing. We decided to come back there once the tanks have respec'd as DPS so we can just burn through the HP because the raid damage output is very manageable and this fight will be a joke once we have some gear on everyone.

We moved on to the Eternity vault - the entrance via escape pods is a really nice touch. We landed in an Ice field and promptly got our arses handed to us by two laser towers until we realised they were CC and tauntable! Once the towers were down the first boss died pretty quickly afterwards - anyone who has WoW raiding experience will find the normal modes in EV fairly simple.

The second boss killed us more by bugs than anything else, however the new Magmadar in new Molton Core was soon dead and we moved on to EV's own version of the Karazhan chess event - more of an inconvenience than a boss, but the pillars gave us loot so no-one complained.

Next up was a really interesting boss where everyone gets a mob to defeat in 1 on 1 combat - even the healers. Its a cool idea and it was soon dead once we realised some people needed their own group because of a stupid group heal problem.

With the contest boss down we were finally onto the last boss, who was a fun challenge and felt like a proper end game boss. We had a few amusing wipes with the floor disappearing under our feet and other such amusing bugs, like the boss staying immune and unabl to break the shield int he final phase (under 25% hp left!) We had to call the raid off though because it was time for me to go to bed, and we will be back to defeat Soa and Bonethrasher and probably a load of world bosses tonight.

All round we got some great loot and schematics - well everyone else did - the instance decided i wasn't allowed any new epics last night!! lol

All in all a fun and easy raiding experience for the guild leaving us a lot to look forward to with hard and nightmare modes. As well as more bosses being added to the Hutt palace in the next patch this or next week!.

To everyone who didn't get to come - keep on leveling and i look forward to raiding with you all in the not to distant future!